Are consumers at risk from eating meat that comes from farms colonized by MRSA?
The risk is that MRSA will be transferred to the meat at [the time of] slaughter and then come home with buyers. If you then handle that raw meat in your kitchen, it is possible that you will transfer the bacterium to your skin or to your nostrils. It would then join the population of drug-sensitive staph or MRSA that may already reside on your body, leaving you at potential risk for an infection at some unpredictable future date. Are either organic or conventional farms more vulnerable to becoming entrenched by this superbug? There’s a team at University of Iowa whose discovery of MRSA [called MRSA ST398] in pigs in Iowa is described in Superbug. Subsequently, they went on to compare the prevalence of MRSA ST398 on organic and conventional-confinement farms in Iowa and Illinois. On the conventional farms, 24 percent of the pigs carried MRSA. On the organic farms, none did. Advocates of conventional agriculture claim that no proof exists that antibiotic use in livestock contributes to
